China

National identity

Pictures of the enemy

NATIONAL day, October 1st this and every year, might seem like a fine time to put aside recent differences with that biggish neighbour across the East China Sea. It might, were it not the case that the national identity has become so unfortunately bound up with demonstrations against Japan. So we turn from recent differences to subjects less timely.

THE horrors of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 have long stoked the imagination of Chinese artists. In just the past three years, two films have tackled the subject: Zhang Yimou’s “The Flowers of War” and “City of Life and Death” by Lu Chuan (on the film’s set, above). Neither director shies away from presenting the brutality of the Japanese army, who, on invading the city, murdered hundreds of thousands of people. But one difference proved crucial to the films’ longevity at the box office. The patriotic “Flowers” became the highest-grossing Chinese film of 2011. Mr Lu’s film, which cast a Japanese soldier in a nuanced light, fared well in terms of ticket sales initially but was pulled from screens prematurely, without having time for its natural run. The film-maker’s gesture of sympathy towards the Japanese side stirred too much controversy.

There is an established interplay between popular culture and the politics of Sino-Japanese relations. Japan’s inability to issue sufficient apology for its aggressions in the second world war—as compared with Germany’s good example, say—or to pay reparations to its victims, is perpetually offensive to China. Key moments of imperialist aggression, such as the Nanjing massacre, are revisited endlessly in Chinese television, films, radio dramas and novels, with a patriotic zeal. State media puffs up the resentment, as it is doing so with the current fisticuffs over the Diaoyu (or Senkaku) islands.

On September 26th, the Xinhua news agency declared that the islands are China’s “sacred territory since ancient times”. On September 29th, the China Daily took out a double-page advertorial with the headline: “Diaoyu Islands Belong to China”, in the New York Times and some other major American newspapers. Today in China, and beyond, if you have eyes and ears it is difficult to forget Japan's wrongdoings.

Yet it was not always so. In the decades following the second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945), when China’s wounds were still smarting, anti-Japan feeling barely registered in the official propaganda. In the history textbooks of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Japanese aggression was consigned to a few sentences, written in simple, dry language.

In the 1980s the tone changed. “The government found nationalism to be a politically useful tool to rally support to a regime in crisis,” says Yinan He, an expert on Sino-Japanese relations who is based in America. At that time, soon after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party faced widespread resentment. Shifting the focus of public attention away from class struggle, it was thought, could offset mounting social instability. Popular culture became the means.

Post-1980s films, television, novels and radio became imbued with a new sense of national identity. So did school textbooks. Television shows such as 2006’s “Drawing Sword”, a 30-episode series which followed a Chinese platoon fighting Japanese imperialists, drew tens of millions of viewers. Geling Yan’s novella, “13 Flowers of Nanjing” (from which Mr Zhang borrowed for his film) became a bestseller. Entertainment still must toe the official line or risk being shelved, but nationalism became a safe discourse. It also fostered a deep distrust of Japan.

That is why attempts to present a more balanced view, such as Mr Lu’s, have been unwelcome and scarce. When Jiang Wen took his film “Devils on the Doorstep” to the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, it won the competition’s Grand Prix. Mr Jiang had sought to counter Chinese literature and film, which perpetually cast the Chinese population as victims of aggression, with a comedy set in the second Sino-Japanese war. Feted in France, back in China it was banned.

Chinese people’s attitude towards history is a serious problem, according to Mr Lu. “We always say that we have thousands of years of history, and we are proud of this”, he says. “But we destroyed all the records, pulled down the buildings, and buried the truth.” He adds that people took issue with “City of Life and Death” because it went against their history lessons. Though his film was pulled early from cinemas, Mr Lu felt satisfied to see people talking about the issue.”

The point wasn't that the movie was sympathetic to Japan as a whole, just that there was a sympathetic portrayal of one Japanese soldier. The Pianist has a Nazi officer that feeds the protagonist towards the end, but no one would call that movie sympathetic to the Nazis. Similarly, Schindler's List is about one Nazi businessman who works to save Jewish civilians from the Nazi death machine.

The presence of one "Good German" in these movies makes their indictment of the larger Nazi program more powerful not less so.

A movie which says that all Japanese soldiers were inhuman monsters is worse because it side steps the issue of why otherwise normal human beings would do such horrible things.

"At that time, soon after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party faced widespread resentment. . ."

The author appears to suggest that resentment against Japan's WWII crimes and atrocities is fanned up by the Communist Party and is limited only to people living in Mainland China.

Ask anyone from Taiwan or Hong Kong -- two places that are not under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party -- and see whether their attitudes towards Japan's WWII crimes and atrocities would be any different.

(For that matter, ask overseas Chinese -- who for sure are not under the influence of the propaganda of the Communist Party -- ask them and see whether their attitudes towards Japan's WWII crimes and atrocities would be different either.)

In fact, people from Taiwan and Hong Kong were -- and still are -- at the forefront of the Diaoyu Island Protection Movement. Was it because people from both places -- Taiwan and Hong Kong -- were fanned up and brainwashed by the propaganda of the Communist Party?

Actually most people I know from Taiwan view the Japanese in a rather positive light (all the while being aware of their past crimes). Most Honkies are indifferent (with the same caveat).

Also, you're not addressing the point of the article (misleading history textbooks and fanning the flames of nationalism have nasty consequences), you're just saying "everybody hates Japan so the CCP didn't lie". Bear in mind that nobody (let me repeat that: NOBODY) is denying Japan's past atrocities or the way it has whitewashed its own history. It's just that simplifying that narrative has served the CCP very well and helped it keep its power secure, all the time denying its own murderous history.

To get back to your point (resentment against Japan's past crimes): I resent Nazi Germany, Kampuchea, Mao-era China, imperial Japan, colonial France, colonial Britain and countless others' crimes, but I still have German, Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, French and British friends today. It's OK to discuss history, and it's OK to be rational about it.

The Economist says: "THE horrors of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 have long stoked the imagination of Chinese artists."
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By saying that the Economist is being too modest on behalf of Americans.
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With horrors of holocaust, has anyone counted how many anti Germany nazi films and dramas, war or otherwise, stoked out of imagination of American artists from Hollywood alone?
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Compared to Chinese artists in terms of number of films produced on such affairs, my guess is well over 100 to 1 in ratio in favor the American artists.
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IMO, what Chinese film makers have done is not enough and far insufficient to remind Chinese youth the Japanese war time atrocities, and to alert the world of recent rise of Japanese right wing imperialism creeping behind the US back or taking advantage the slack time from the US's "China containment" policy and bandwagon.
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According to news a few months ago, the US Defense Department has a sizable annual budget to sponsor film and entertainment industry in the US for films to projecting positive images of American forces.
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I am not saying all these are wrong and indeed I appluad such sponsorships.
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But come on Anlects, you don't need to be objective or unbaised, but being so blind to truth?

The point is, and it is stated correctly in the article, that the aggressors such as the Germans and the Japanese during World War 2 committed human horrible crimes. Torture, rape, and murders of innocent people were systematic. Post World War however the Germans have apologised for their past mistakes, banned Nazi symbols, and made it a crime to deny the holocaust. The Japanese however have rewritten school textbooks to deny the massacre of Nanjing, denied the use of comfort women (Korean included), and the top leaders of their country still visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which houses Class A war criminals, on a regular basis. Can you imagine the outroar in the Western world if Germany were to build a temple that held Hitler and Goebbels' remains, and Angela Merkel visited this on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure every single European country would then feel exactly what China feels right now.

It is very strange that The Economist should be so persistent on the differences between China and Japan.
Since the illegal "purchase" of the Diaoyu islands by the Japanese Prime minister, Noda, followed by a wave of protests in China a couple of weeks ago, The Economist has published no less than five articles on the matter. And now we have another article which focuses on Chinese nationalism and the undying hatred of the Chinese for the Japanese.
Is The Economist following a sinister agenda which aims at splitting the ties between China and Japan? It definitely seems to be the case. But then, who is behind this sinister scheme and what is the purpose?
There is no doubt that The Economist is one of the propaganda arms of the Western Governments in general and of the US Government in particular. Is the US the directing agency? It is to be noted that over the last eighteen months, the US had done everything to drive a wedge between the Asia Pacific countries and China. Though this campaign was not successful, yet it has not lost its tempo. Only the manner of conducting it has changed. Now, the US officials have taken a back seat while Japan, which is a vassal of the US, and the western media have moved upfront. The "purchase" of the islands and the numerous articles on the supposed Chinese nationalism and their hatred for the Japanese testify it.
The Chinese still remember the wrongs done by the Japanese to them, but the hatred has to a certain extent subsided over the years. It is not therefore necessary to bring it forth so frequently unless the aim is to further the policies of the Americans.

Is this really only a Chinese-Japanese issue, trying to identity national character through trying to find a common enemy?
This describes the whole of human history when in difficult times all cultures, nations resorted to unite against a common enemy.
Even today with all our experience and review of history, as we slide deeper into crisis more and more flash-points, "fronts" open all over the world, old wounds open up threatening with violent conflicts.
The only way of avoiding even more violent confrontations and also to solve the crisis is to understand the whole of humanity is a global, interconnected and totally interdependent network, and by hurting someone,we are hurting ourselves as there are no obsolete parts in this puzzle.
Apart from the very obvious daily events of the crisis more and more scientific studies support this.
Thus educating people about our global network instead of inciting hatred against others should be the most important activity of today's leaders.
From the recent military campaigns all over the world there is one very obvious message: today there is not such thing as "winning a war", even the US lost all their recent military campaigns since WWII considering the purposes of the campaigns, and we haven't even mentioned nuclear possibilities...

Out of the few WWII movies that are made in Japan, none of them show remorse or repent. Most movies show Japan as also victim of WWII.

In fact, pianist or Schindler's List is the exception rather than the norm. Most Hollywood movies on WWII, i.e. "The Longest Day", "A Bridge too far", "Where Eagles Dare", "The Great Escape",....etc all portray German especially the Nazis as villains.

I find it inadequate to accuse the Chinese Government for how the Chinese people feel toward Japan. While I do acknowledge the existence of government propaganda in play, but let us tread carefully to not confuse correlation with causation. These feelings of the Chinese people that are also shared, to various extent, by many of her neighbors might be far more democratic, multitudinous, and nuanced than can be simply generalized into a single cause.

The Chinese propaganda machine is rolling again, playing the victim card and even making these tired and strange comparisons with Nazi Germany.

The Japanese have not fired a single shot abroad in 67 years, have apologized dozens of times to China, have paid billions of dollars in reparations money, and have normalized ties with China and Korea in 1970's. Extreme right-wing revisionist politicians, like the top of the Air Self-Defense Forces were fired when he said that the war was China's fault. Japanese textbooks all clearly state that Japan was the aggressor and mention the Nanking massacre.

If China really wants to be a world power, it should accept Japan as its neighbor and move beyond the past.

This article shows some improvement over TE's usual subtly sinophobic language. Yet you still see things like this:

"Japan’s inability to issue sufficient apology for its aggressions in the second world war—as compared with Germany’s good example, say—or to pay reparations to its victims, is perpetually offensive to China."

The proper word to place at the end of that sentence is "humanity". The longer the West accepts or defends Japan's poor behavior, the longer it will persist.

Who are you to judge the Chinese? The Jews never forgot. You are saying we should let the holocaust wreaked upon the Chinese all over East and SE Asia by the japanese be forgotten? Your bias is not appreciated.
Nevertheless the opinion in the article is ultimately but that of the writer. One with inadequate empathy but seeking more to mollify a new friend - the Japanese - than anything else.
I too would had been prepared to accept the post war baby-boomers Japanese and the X and y generations but atonement for past sins must be made to demonstrate this. A tangible way to achieve this would be for the Japanese government to return the the Diaoyus or Senkakus to the Chinese. Then a new era can begin in Chinese-Japanese relationship and bygones be bygones.
However, to augment this new start, the Japanese PM should also make a visit to the Chinese war memorials and lay a wreath the way it was done by one of the earlier post war Japanese PM (I forget his name) in Singapore, and the way the Singapore PM laid a similar wreath at the Indonesian memorial for the two Indonesians who were caught and hanged for murder and sabotage.
Tokyo need to consider the bigger picture and accept that peace will come only with humble acts of atonement rather than acts of misplaced pride and arrogance. Saying sorry is meaningless without meaningful acts of contrition. Visiting the Yaskuni Shrine without visiting the non Japanese war deaths memorials and insisting on clinging on to laundered stolen property is certainly not the way to salve the festering wounds. More an affront than anything else and an act which encourages a desire to inflict the Japanese a final defeat before the day is done insofar as its Asian neighbours are concerned.
If it is fate, if it is destiny then perhaps it is Mr Noda who has been chosen to do that which will close a painful chapter and open a new one. Will Mr Noda carry the responsibility for Japan and the Japanese people to close the page for their fathers' sins? Will he accept this as his responsibility and legacy for his people and country?

Early World War 2 movies depicted the Nazis as demons. People motivated purely by evil to do evil. There was no more reason to their hatred then there was for an orc in Lord of the Rings.

Later, that changed and Germans were depicted as real people. The holocaust wasn't sanitzed or downplayed, but the movies started asking why otherwise sane normal people got caught up in this enterprise. How did a young person from Hamburg grow up and come to believe that killing Jews was the right thing to do? What was he told? What happened to him if he didn't obey?

These were the mpre "balanced" view.

Similarly, movies about the Sino Japanese war should explore the transformation of a 22 year old carpenter drafted from Tokyo into a murdering rapist. Also why those soldiers who weren't, (because many weren't) did so little to stop the carnage going around them. These are interesting questions.

"Balanced view" in that sentence doesn't suggest that the Japanese and the Chinese in Nanjing are at some moral equivalence. The author meant that portraying a Japanese soldier as a human with hopes, dreams, and personal view of their own was more accurate than making them all faceless soldiers whose only motivation was "kill Chinese people."

The Japanese atroscities against Chinese were not limited to the border of China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. I came from Malaysia and my secondary school has a memorial stone for teachers and students hunted down and killed by Japanese for supporting China in the fight against Japanese invasion.
I heard horror stories from my grandmother about what happen to her brother who was a chinese student being hunted by the Japanese when they took over Malaya and the torture inflicted by the Japanese army on Chinese population in Malaya.

I might want to point out that U.S. returned the islands to Japan was one of the many wrongdoings to fight communism.

The only reason that it was signed to return to Japan without even noticing China was that China was enemy communist country.

It happened during the cold war, like the support of Afghanistan against the Soviets, among many others.

Now the world changed. China is only communist by name, and still reforming towards the right direction (the fall of the leftist Bo Xilai, and the push of democratic reform in low-level governments), yet many in the West still "by default" stand against China, no matter what they are talking about, ignoring totally the rise of right wing in Japan, which tend to deny that the islands have been taken by war from China, together with Taiwan in 1895. And most dangerously, deny the whole reality of WWII.

The bias against China in this article should not come as a surprise to the readers of this magazine or to anyone who follows western media reporting on China. Wverwhelming majority of western reporters working in China were either teenagers or in college in 1989 when Tienanman happened. Understandably, the event was etched
in their brain. The following years of indoctrination further cemented their negative perception of China. Beforetheir assingment to the current posts in China, very few of them, I suspect, had grasped Chinese history, culture and society beyond a few books, which probably invariably reinforced their ideological bent.

The deep-rooted prejudice may make them oblivious to or ignorant of myriad changes that have been taking place in China over the past 20 years, but it is no obsticle to their job performence. Their task after all centers on one thing, and one thing only: muckraking; no muck found, create some, then rake. The result is a race to the bottom: western reporters competing to see who can come up with most conspiracy stories, who can turn a benign and minute event into a virulent attack and who can paint the darkest picture of China consistantly. Anyone remembers last time seeing a non-nagative report on China in this magazine or in other western media?

If bias works well for propaganda, ignorance doesn't.

The author says:"...anti-Japan feelings barly registered in th official propaganda" before the 1980s. The author is flatly wrong.

About 70% of the movies made in the 1950s and 1960s were war films, 50% of which were about the war against Japanese occupation. Similar numbers held true for novels. Some of the novels dipicting the Japanese brutal campaigns in the early 1940s were so popular they became household names.

The author suggests that Chinese people's anger toward Japan's war crimes was the result of "state media puffs up resentment". A commonly deployed technique by western media is to label, without exception, any Chinese mass demonstrations in supporting govt policies, defending national interests, opposing foreign interference as govt controlled movements. Such labeling is intented to provide a free hand for the West to discredit China's positions. It also creates a stereotype that Chinese citizens are zombies devoid of real feelings. Though this stereotype is laughable for it's so crude anyone with any amount of common sense will and should dismiss it off hand, its perniciousness should not be underestimated. The insinuation that Chines people, many of whom lost family members to the Japanese atrocities, are not genuienly angry, only putting up an act, toward a country that murdered millions of their fellow countrymen, has paid no restitution, has built a shrine for its war crminals, is not only highly offensive to Chinese people, but a contempt for the victims of Japanese war crimes.

Japan's unrepentant behavior has been tacitly encouraged by the West for decades. The author's peevish remark that "Nanjing massacre are revisisted endlessly" epitomizes the dismissive attitude of western media on the issue. It's shameful that the victims of Nanjing massacre are sacrificed again in the hands of western media for their ideological zeal to demonize China.

It's safe to say the author would never dare to utter the same sentiment about the hundreds of thousands of films, tv shows and novels about Auschwitz or the Holocaust. Not even remotely!

Excellent article by The Economist. The Chinese communists, now that they left their communism by the door to enter the capitalist world, had nothing else than hatred for Japan in order to legitimize their rule. The recent hysterical outbursts (and the rants on this board) are a result of two decades of brainwashing.

The Problem with the Japanese is that they are only de jure a liberal pluralistic society in the Western sense. When the Americans brought them their democracy, they left many of the old authoritarian structures in place. During the reign of the LDP most Japanese people, apart from very few leftists, have been educated to accept right-wing views. You can see Japanese revisionism easily if you visit some of their war memorial sites. They have a clear focus on the Japanese suffering and although they don't necessarily describe the war like it has been brought upon them, it is shown like a tsunami kind of thing, that just happened. The same revisionism happens in school education. Another problem is that the conservatives managed to sorely depoliticise many people. I bet you would find many Japanese, especially in the younger generations, wondering what the whole thing is about and feeling attacked out of nowhere. Then they hear in the right-wing media that Chinese are nuts over past crap, which matches with their right-wing knowledge and the whole thing is over for them.
I really love Japan and Japanese people, but this has always annoyed me so much. I hope at some point Japanese people will wake up a little. Maybe the protests against nuclear power are harbingers of some more vivid political life in Japan? They could really use some (who couldn't). The Chinese, in my opinion, have every right to be mad at Japan, but they should be aware at the same time, that they are manipulated as well (who shouldn't).